Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus could theoretically be home to methane-breathing alien life, NASA said Thursday.
Researchers made the announcement based on data from 2015, when the spacecraft Cassini detected the presence of hydrogen during a flyby through a plume of gas and ice erupting from Enceladus’ south pole. The hydrogen could be a sign of methanogenesis, a form of anaerobic respiration in which microbes produce methane.
“We now know that Enceladus has almost all of the ingredients you would need to support life as we know it on Earth,” Linda Spilker, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said Thursday at a press conference.
The findings were published Thursday at the journal Science.
In February, NASA announced it had discovered a “treasure trove” of Earth-sized planets orbiting a nearby dwarf star. Three of the seven newly discovered planets lie in the so-called “Goldilocks zone,” meaning they are the right distance from the star they orbit to possibly harbor water, or even life.
The agency is refocusing on deep space exploration under President Donald Trump, who signed a bill into law last month that authorized federal funding for NASA’s 2018 budget year and added human exploration of Mars as an agency objective.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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